


The Damage Done

by Byrcca



Series: Stuff and Nonsense [5]
Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Episode: s01e14 Faces, F/M, Proto P/T
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-15
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2019-04-23 06:05:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14326191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Byrcca/pseuds/Byrcca
Summary: Because it’s unreasonable to assume that Tom was celibate until he and B’Elanna came together in Revulsion. Set sometime after Faces.





	The Damage Done

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Elegies](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3453380) by [Delwin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Delwin/pseuds/Delwin). 



> Delwin has written a wonderful story called Elegies that persuaded me to set this during Faces.
> 
> I’m putting it in Stuff and Nonsense only because it feels unfinished, but I also feel that more would lessen it. It tops out past my thousand word limit but that’s an arbitrary rule so who cares.

**

He pushed his arms through the jumpsuit sleeves, then sat on the corner of the bed and bent over to pull on a sock. 

“Tom?” she said. “We can’t do this again.”

He pulled on the other sock, then stood and reached for his boots.

“It’s been really great, but… Tom?”

“Yeah,” he said. He pulled up the zip, and straightened his collar. 

“I’m interested in someone else. Interested.”

He turned then and smiled at her. “Anyone I know?” he asked.

She smiled back, tilted her head. She stretched up and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “You might have run into him once or twice,” she agreed. 

“Okay,” he said. He finger-combed his hair, shot his cuffs, ran a hand down his chest to his belly. It was all automatic; there was little likelihood he’d run into anyone in the corridor half way through gamma shift. 

“I think you might be interested in someone else, too,” she commented. He glanced at her and raised an eyebrow. 

“Don’t listen to scuttlebutt, Meg. I only have eyes for you.” He sent her his best seductive smile. 

“It’s just, sometimes it feels like it’s not me you’re with.” She arched an eyebrow, daring him to dispute her. He stilled. 

“Meg, if I ever made you feel like I didn’t want you…” 

She belted her robe and shoved him toward the door. “Sure,” she said. 

“See you around?” Tom asked as the doors slid open.

“It’s a small ship,” she quipped. “I don’t see how you’d miss me.”

“Oh, I’ll miss you,” he answered. “Desperately.” 

She laughed and kissed his cheek again, then gave him a tiny shove. He smiled ruefully and turned toward the turbolift, and saw B’Elanna there, placing the cover on a panel. Damnit. He froze for a second, then started toward her, his brain already working overtime trying to come up with an explanation for why he was leaving Megan Delaney’s quarters at oh three hundred. She stepped into the ‘lift, and looked away from him. 

“B’Elan—” was as far as he got before the doors slid shut in his face. “Shit,” he said.

 

_Well I crash and I burn maybe someday you'll learn_  
_I'm only human on the inside_  
_I stumble, I fall, baby under it all_  
_I'm only human on the inside_  
_On the inside_

 

**

It shouldn’t hurt. It shouldn’t. So why did it? Obviously, Tom would be seeing someone. And pretty, curvy, vivacious Megan Delaney fit the bill. She was bright, sparkling as well as intelligent, and she worked in stellar cartography, which meant they likely worked together plotting _Voyager’s_ way home. And she didn’t expect Tom to live like a monk, not being stuck out here for the next seventy-five years. So, it shouldn’t hurt, but it did. 

There’d been nothing. No whispers, no rumor. No shared meals in the mess, no obvious attraction on the holodeck. They’d been incredibly discreet. It was dumb luck she’d been here tonight, practically outside Megan’s door, when Tom left her quarters. She’d assigned Fitzpatrick to this maintenance job, but he’d sprained his wrist yesterday in the gym, and she couldn’t sleep anyway. Damnit. 

He’d been so friendly lately, more-than-friends-ly. Attentive, flirty. She should have known better. She did know better. Men like Tom Paris weren’t interested in women like her, not when women like Megan were available. Not when she was B’Elanna Torres. 

Now that his caustic defensiveness had calmed, his real personality had started to come through. He was charismatic, magnetic. People liked him, even if they didn’t want to. He was a good officer; Janeway had been right to trust him with his pips. And he was, unfortunately for her, compelling. She’d been warned against men like him by her mother, who would know. Charming, smooth-talking men with eyes that fooled you into believing that you were the only one they saw, the only one they focused on. 

B’Elanna had hoped she was beyond this need to be loved by the _popular crowd_. She was the chief engineer of a state of the art Federation starship. She had the respect and confidence of her captain, and Chakotay’s steady, accepting, encouraging presence. But still...she’d had to draw a line between B’Elanna, Maquis resistance fighter, and Lieutenant Torres, chief engineer, and her friendships had suffered, were different now. She’d never minded being alone before, had sometimes craved it. And stuck on a ship of 145 people, she was hardly alone. But she was lonely. 

Harry’s friendship had come as a surprise, and her initial impulse, to erect a barrier of polite distance between them, had been gradually eroded by his patient, persistent overtures. But Harry came with Tom Paris, and Tom Paris came with a surprising gentleness and beautiful eyes that had lulled her into dropping the walls that had kept her safe until now. 

Since they’d returned from the nightmare in those Viidian mines he’d been kind. Concerned but not smothering, attentive, and had appeared to be genuinely interested in her well being, in her as a person, as a friend. She’d been lulled into thinking that just maybe… She’d been a fool. And B’Elanna Torres wasn’t an idiot. She’d indulged in an adolescent fantasy about a man with the face of an angel, but she was the one who’d fallen to… _Voyager’s_ deck plates. And it hurt every bit as much as it would have had she tumbled from the upper engineering deck onto the floor below. More so because it was self-inflicted. She knew better. 

She knew better.

 

_See I bleed and I bruise oh, but what's it to you_  
_I'm only human on the inside_  
_And though looks may deceive make it hard to believe_  
_I'm only human on the inside_

 

**

It was funny—he’d thought of the half-Klingon woman as Torres, but the frightened, tearful, fully human woman in those mines would forever be B’Elanna to him. And she would never be his. Neither of them. He was a fool to even entertain the notion. Because the honourable Klingon would never want to have anything to do with him. 

So you take what you can get, right? He’d learned that the hard way. And sometimes the universe is merciful. Of course, sometimes it was just stringing you along; sometimes it turned around and laughed in your face. 

His affair with Meg had started just after the Caretaker had flung them a lifetime from home; a lifetime from everything that was familiar. And in their fear and grief, they’d come together. They’d both had their eyes wide open, had understood it wasn’t about romance but, because she was Megan, Tom had felt loved again for the first time in years. It hadn’t lasted, had been more about shared trauma than deeper affection, but after the horror of Durst’s death—Pete. His name was Pete—Meg, being Meg, had welcomed him again, enfolded him in her heart and in her arms, hoping to ease him. She hadn’t. He was still having nightmares, and his weakness, his stupidity, had just made his life exponentially more complicated. 

Something had changed for him in those mines, changed within him, and it had nothing to do with Pete’s death. Witnessing strong, scornful, capable B’Elanna Torres reduced to a weeping, shaking, shivering ball of pain and fear had hurt him more that he’d admit. It had made him stand up, step up, the urge to protect and comfort her overriding the safeguards he’d spent years erecting around his heart. He’d have died to keep her safe, willingly, if not gladly. He liked to think he’d have done the same for Pete but obviously he hadn’t. 

And once they’d returned to _Voyager_ he couldn’t stay away from her. He’d checked up on her in sickbay and he’d sat with her while she slept, wanting to hold her hand but not daring to. And while she was undergoing the treatments to reintegrate her Klingon DNA, he had been angry that the Doctor had appeared so unconcerned by her pain. He’d cast himself as her champion until she’d asked him to leave, begged him to go, to give her privacy. 

But, luckily, they shared a friend in Harry Kim and once she was back on duty he could spend a little time with her: a shared meal in the messhall, a game of pool in Sandrine’s with Harry, who was also concerned about her, acting as a buffer. 

And he’d enjoyed it. Actively looked forward to the time they would spend together. And he’d just blown it, again. 

The ‘lift arrived and Tom stepped in and called for his deck. He would not comm B’Elanna and try to explain. There really was nothing to be said.

 

_There's blood in these veins and I cry when in pain_  
_I'm only human on the inside_  
_And though looks may deceive make it hard to believe_  
_I'm only human on the inside_  
_On the inside_

**

She’d been trying to leave for the last ten minutes, knowing that Tom would appear and dreading it, but Harry wouldn’t shut up. And she didn’t want to cut him off, didn’t want to be rude to the only friend she had left on _Voyager_. Whoever said, it’s lonely at the top wasn’t kidding. She recognized that her position isolated her from her staff, from her former friends, and this realization gave her new and sympathetic insight into Captain Janeway’s day. And evenings.

But before she could ponder that too deeply, Tom appeared with an unruffled expression and his easy smile, and she felt as embarrassed and unsure as she had last night. Then her combadge had chirped and Vorik had come to her rescue with an emergency that he couldn’t handle, preventing her from having to make up an excuse to leave. 

She’d comprehended the gel pack technology and _Voyager’s_ related systems immediately. It was logical, simple, intuitive. It was child’s play. For the most part. That was one of the reasons she sometimes lost her temper with her staff, especially the ‘fleeters, who had been trained in the new technology but sometimes still didn’t get it. That always surprised and irritated her, but this morning she was thankful for Vorik’s lack of experience; she was glad of the excuse; she was grateful to be gone. 

She hadn’t known how she would react to him, couldn’t guess at the way her breath had caught, the way her stomachs had twisted, the way her heart rate had sped up. It wasn’t just the pull of attraction that she always felt whenever he was around, it was her acute embarrassment at having caught him last night. The feeling that he knew her secret longings. And she knew, with absolute certainty, that she wouldn’t be able to stand it if he were nice to her this morning. She wouldn’t have been able to bear it. 

In the forced intimacy of that Viidian prison, she had vomited her pain and fear on Tom and he hadn’t known what to do with it. Their time together had been incredibly intimate, and now, in retrospect, incredibly embarrassing. She regretted it deeply, especially now that she knew about his relationship with Megan Delaney. Well, it was over. It was done. She’d been weak and ill, but she was herself again now. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.

She exhaled in relief when she stepped into engineering. 

_I thought you'd come through I thought you'd come clean_  
_You were the best thing I should never have seen_  
_Cause you go to extremes you push me too far_  
_Then you keep going 'till you break my heart_  
_Yeah you break my heart_

**

Tom caught sight of them immediately, two dark heads bent together, Harry’s expression open, hers, guarded. She looked tired, and he could see her struggle for patience as Harry related some long-winded story. He picked up a tray and straightened his shoulders, let out a breath and walked over to their table. “Hey, Tom.” Harry smiled at him. 

Her eyes flew to his face and he caught a look of panic in them before her gaze slid away from his. Her combadge chirped. “Ensign Vorik to Lieutenant Torres.”

Tom scowled into his eggs as she answered. “Go ahead.” It was something about the plasma flow constrictors, something that only she could solve, of course. 

She stood and grabbed her tray. “I have to go. Bye, Harry.”

It would have been easy to reach out, wrap his fingers around her upper arm. To inject just the right amount of sincerity and regret into his voice. The right amount of warmth. To speak just loudly enough for the people at the next table to hear. To say, ‘I’m sorry about last night. I would have stayed until morning but I needed a clean uniform.’ To be as indiscreet as he had been guarded with Meg.

To start a rumor. 

Funny, sweet, uncomplicated Megan would have laughed and explained. Maybe cuffed him for his impertinence. But B’Elanna was complicated, and the innuendo would have hurt and embarrassed her, so he kept his mouth shut. 

But, still, he wanted to touch her if only through two layers of Starfleet issue cloth. 

 

 _I thought you'd come through I thought you'd come clean_  
_You were the best thing I should never have seen_  
_Cause you go to extremes you push me too far_  
_Then you keep going 'till you break my heart_  
_Yeah you break my heart_

 

***

**Author's Note:**

> The first scene popped into my head whole and unadorned, but I had no idea where to take it. Then I was listening to a Pretenders cd while doing the dishes (I listen to the best music/get most of my fic thinking done while washing the dishes), and this resonated (Day of Honor, duh!): 
> 
>  
> 
> _If love was a war it's you that has won_  
>  _While I was confessing it you held your tongue_  
>  _Now the damage is done_
> 
>  
> 
> I shied away from the underlying negativity of the lines, not wanting to link them with the P/Ter payoff episode. But I thought, Hey! The rest of the song works for the Meg story. So, ta-daa! Or apologies. Whichever. 
> 
> Songwriters: MARK CHRISTOPHER MCENTEE, SHELLY PEIKEN  
> Human On The Inside lyrics © Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd., Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC


End file.
